“I’ll shouldn’t let you do this,” Karawyn said, “but I know you well enough; it won’t do any good to try and stop you. So go right ahead, Marek; I’ve unlocked the files.” She’d gone out on the strangest and most precarious of limbs to help him; the significance of the fact was not lost on him. All of Candice Amberlin’s files had been sealed under SAO lock: a common enough procedure whenever a xenologist died under unusual circumstances. Candice Amberlin’s case had been officially closed, implying that there were nothing unusual in her demise, but the presence of a Secure Access Only lock was proof of something else. Someone, somewhere suspected… …something. They’d locked Candice’s files in order to keep that particular something under wraps. Karawyn—at Marek’s own insistence—punched a hole in that silence and let him worm his way through. He’d spent the earliest parts of the day, swimming in the data-sea: grepping intel as any cop might have called the act, playing Sherlock, as Jarédo liked to say. It hadn’t actually been Jarédo’s intention to deputize Marek, but it had been Marek who made himself useful and practically demanded to help; and now, rather than continue his half-legal swim through seas of data, Marek picked his way along one of the city’s countless Whisper Paths: fine gravel crunching beneath his sandals. Errant grains of it worked between his toes, biting at the sensitive skin. He shouldn’t have been here, knowing what he knew…and yet he stepped along the meandering gravel walkway, knowing what he knew and immune (for as long as he remained here) to anyone finding out that he’d scored the means for a gray-legal SAO breech. It was easy to think and walk, easy to pick at the frayed ends of whatever mystery he’d stumbled into. There had been hysteria at the Academy, a kind of simmering paranoia. Candice Amberlin knew something, was onto something… …and it killed her. Someone else knew what it was, and they’d talked the police into keeping quiet about it and closing Candice Amberlin’s case. It was easy, Marek knew, to buy the police. Every human had a price, and every price was surprisingly low. And now, Marek (invisible within the alien influence of a Whisper Path) asked questions of himself and tried—desperately—to fit puzzle pieces together. They didn’t fit. He was missing something, but it was there, in the files he wasn’t officially supposed to see…. * * * When I first conceived of the idea for The Whisper Path, posted in the Writer’s Gallery, I didn’t expect to open the little brother to Pandora’s Box. But I did. The character, Candice Amberlin is dead and two other characters (Marek and Jarédo) have taken the first tentative steps into learning precisely why she died. It’s bigger than they could possibly have imagined. The piece written above isn’t a direct sequel to “The Whisper Path.” It’s a response to the image I’d created. As with many of my gallery postings, my images bear distinct relationships to stories, and the story of the Whisper Path came directly from this tweaked image of a guy walking through a park. It’s a digital montage, of sorts, as there was no guy walking through the park on the day that I made the initial photograph. The walker, rendered ghostly here, is an import from Chicago’s Halsted Street. He works well enough here, however. As always, thank you for viewing, and reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great remainder of this overtly memorial weekend.